New Years day clean up (number 3)

Today I realised that freezing weather and litter picking aren’t a great combination. Not only does the bitter cold eliminate the appeal of standing outside, but the ice itself appears to act as your enemy, physically locking up litter into multicoloured frozen blocks. Nevertheless we thought we’d seize the lack of traffic (being New Years day) and don the wolly hat and gloves to head out. The location today was quite a large one and we covered ground between Thorncombe and Crewkerne – although we only really scratched the surface and so are far from done. After spending a while thinking about how we could go about collecting this litter – which is rather awkwardly lining the whole section of road with little to no verge to safely walk down – daddy came up with the Land Rover method of collection. This entailed me walking in front of the Landie whilst daddy drove slowly from behind, carrying the full bags of litter and protecting me from any vehicles (we were surprised how many had actually braved the icy roads). It worked surprisingly well, and is as close as you’re going to get to a closed-road so an overall useful tip for our future collections…

Our findings today were almost all small pieces of plastic – so infuriating. When driving past you only really see the large objects but when you dig around in the undergrowth you are guaranteed to find a carpet of tiny microplastic flecks, just waiting to be washed away into our rivers and emptied out into our oceans.